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including online interactive materials,
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digital copies of our proposals and reviews
for download.

Workshop Breakout Summaries:

Assorted Workshop Materials:

Summary

Multi-use, multi-user facilities to support geoscience research require durable infrastructure, built and used over significant time periods, rarely less than five years and sometimes for twenty years or more. Investment in these facilities can be utilized by numerous investigators in diverse fields but only if the facilities incorporate capabilities required for individual research projects that may be proposed long after a facility is designed.

NSF/EAR has indicated its plan to recompete the management and operation of its seismic and geodetic facilities in 2018 (see 2009 Dear Colleague Letter on Plans for Integration and Recompetition of EAR Solid Earth Deformation Facilities). In order to inform this recompetition, IRIS, UNAVCO, and the EarthScope National Office (ENO) are working together to gather community input for NSF on the key scientific questions and emerging areas of research the geosciences community will be pursuing in 2018 and beyond, and the seismic and geodetic facility capabilities that will be required to support this research. We plan to describe two types of capabilities:

Foundational facilities are those seismic and geodetic capabilities without which geoscience research, as practiced today, could not continue

Frontier facilities are new capabilities, beyond those that might presently exist, which will be required to make rapid progress in addressing one or more science grand challenge questions

Workshop

The 2 ½ day workshop will be organized around broad geoscience research and outreach needs beyond 2018: rheology and global geodynamics, fault and volcano systems, evolving landscapes, and discovery-mode Earth science. For each topic, several concise presentations and Q&A periods in plenary sessions, including at least one focusing on broader impacts, will be followed by breakout sessions charged to address questions about emerging science opportunities, required facilities, and broader impacts.

Location and Dates

The workshop will be held at the Lansdowne Resort and Conference Center in Leesburg, VA about 8 miles from Dulles International Airport and a 40 min drive from Washinton, DC. The Workshop will begin in the late afternoon of Sunday May 3rd and continue through lunch on Wednesday May 6th.

Participation

Participation in the workshop will be limited to 100 researchers and educators from the geoscience community. Applications to attend the workshop will be accepted between December 1, 2014 and February 15, 2015. The Workshop Organizing Committee will choose participants to represent the seismological, geodetic, and broader geoscience research communities, with special attention to including early-career investigators, women, and underrepresented minorities. Attendees will be notified by March 2, 2015.

Whitepapers and Community Webinars

Whitepapers will be solicited from the IRIS, UNAVCO and EarthScope communities, and researchers and educators in allied geoscience disciplines. These short (1-2 pages) documents will describe an important scientific question or problem the community member expects to be working during the next decade and the seismic or geodetic facility capabilities that would enable further progress in addressing this scientific issue or support related broader impact needs. The goal of these whitepapers is to gather input from a broad cross-section of the geoscience community, since attendance at the workshop will be limited.

Community Webinars: Several disciplinary communities in the geosciences have already identified science grand challenges and future research opportunities. Webinars will review and, if necessary, produce updates to the earlier reports and describe how complementary facilities of other agencies (USGS, NASA, NOAA, and DOE) are expected to support research.

Workshop Report

A written workshop report will be produced to summarize both foundational and frontier, seismic and geodetic facility capabilities required post-2018. A draft report assembled by a Writing Committee will summarize recommendations of the workshop attendees and will be available for public comment before the report is finalized. After the report is complete, the lead editors of the report will brief NSF upper management and Division Directors within GEO.

Organizing Committee

Lucy Flesch, Co-Chair

Purdue University

Karen Fischer, Co-Chair

Brown University

Greg Beroza

Stanford University

Roland Burgmann

University of California, Berkeley

Jay Famiglietti

University of California, Irvine and JPL

Kristine Larson

University of Colorado

Cathy Manduca

Carleton College

Susan Schwartz

University of California, Santa Cruz

Leigh Stearns

University of Kansas

Rebecca Walker

Mt. San Antonio College

Kelin Whipple

Arizona State University

Doug Wiens

Washington University

Writing Committee

Rick Aster, Co-Editor

Colorado State University

Mark Simons, Co-Editor

California Institute of Technology

Roland Burgmann

University of California, Berkeley

Estelle Chaussard

University of California, Berkeley

Gary Ebert

Oregon State University

Natalya Gomez

McGill University

Bill Hammond

University of Nevada, Reno

Steve Holbrook

University of Wyoming

John Hole

Virginia Tech

Thorne Lay

University of California, Santa Cruz

Steve McNutt

University of South Florida

Michael Oskin

University of California, Davis

Brandon Schmandt

University of New Mexico

David Schmidt

University of Washington

Leigh Stearns

University of Kansas

John Vidale

University of Washington

Lara Wagner

Carnegie Institution for Science

Paul Winberry

Central Washington University

Breakout Session Charge

The goal of each Breakout Session is to define both the foundational and frontier geodetic and seismic facility capabilities required to advance geoscience research and education post-2018. Foundational facility capabilities are those without which geoscience research, as practiced today, could not continue. Frontier facilities capabilities are those new capabilities, beyond those which might presently exist, which will be required to make rapid progress in addressing one or more science grand challenge questions.

Each Breakout Session will develop written recommendations that address these questions:

What key scientific questions, emerging science opportunities and technical advances will geoscientists be pursuing in 2018 and beyond?

What foundational and frontier geodetic and seismic facility capabilities will be required to support geoscience research in 2018 and beyond?

The Lansdowne Resort and Conference Center is located in Leesburg, VA about 8 miles from Dulles International Airport (IAD) and a 40 min drive from Washington, DC. Lansdowne provides a paid shuttle service to and from Dulles International Airport for a cost of $30.00 per person each way.

Support for Attendees

Participants selected by the Organizing Committee, will be provided with up to $500 to cover the cost of transportation including airfare, parking, taxis and other costs. Lodging and meals during the Workshop will be paid directly by the conference organizers.

Housing Reservations

Lodging will be provided at the Lansdowne Resort and Conference Center. Participants selected by the Organizing Committee will receive information on lodging in early March.

Sunday, May 3rd

Time

Title

3:00 PM
– 7:00 PM

Registration - Amphitheater Foyer

7:30 PM
– 7:40 PM

Welcome and Workshop Goals - Amphitheater

(Workshop Organizing Committee)

7:40 PM
– 8:30 PM

Pop-up talks (< 5 minutes) on: "exciting things to work on with the facilities of the future."

Individual investigators will not have either the experience or resources to provide the kinds of compelling arguments needed to justify scientific investments to a skeptical public or to the policy-makers who must approve these kinds of investments. More and more, it will be the role of community-based networks and facilities to gather these data, and to make those cases based on the accumulated results of that community. Any successor enterprise to the current UNAVCO and IRIS facilities must have as a central part of its structure a robust education and community outreach enterprise that both supports individual investigators in making the case for the societal benefits of their work, and especially in gathering the results of these many PI-led efforts in terms of their societal impacts (education, insfrastructure, preparedness, sustainability, etc.) and making a coherent national-level case for the need for future investigations. This entity will require the resources to fully support PI-led Broader Impact activities, to ensure that these activities yield the intended outcomes, and to gather from all investigators information about these outcomes to make a community-level case for the importance of these scientific efforts.

Last Name

Ryan

What key scientific questions, emerging science opportunities and technical advances will you be pursuing in 2018 and beyond?

UNAVCO and IRIS supported science already focuses on a wide range of issues of critical societal importance: hazardous deep-Earth event prediction and analysis; climate change; global water resources; hazardous weather/atmospheric events prediction and analysis. The growing applications of TLS and related Earth imaging technologies will inevitably lead into a wider range of societally critical questions to answer, which any successor enterprise must inevitably support and facilitate.

What foundational or frontier geodetic and seismic facility capabilities will be required to support geoscience research in 2018 and beyond?

The ability to explicitly address the societal relevance and impacts of science is becoming all the more critical in an age where the overwhelming expansion of (largely un-vetted) information leads to public confusion and doubt about the importance of science in their daily lives. As such, at every level, being able to make a compelling case to non-scientific constituencies, both in proposing new investigations and in documenting the outcomes and benefits of scientific investments is an absolute necessity.

The workshop organizers are planning on holding four webinars prior to the workshop to provide another forum for input to the workshop. Webinars will open with brief presentations, but a significant fraction of each hour will be devoted to structured discussion among participants. Participants are encouraged to review prior strategic planning reports (e.g. the Grand Challenge documents and New Research Opportunities in Earth Sciences NRC Report).

Supporting broader educational impacts

Participants in this webinar will synthesize the guidance from recent education reports that bears on the ability of the SAGE/GAGE facilities to strengthen broader educational impacts. We will discuss key ideas from reports such as Engage to Excel (PCAST report), the Next Generation Science Standards, STEM Learning is Everywhere, and Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation as well as reports and guiding documents from Earthscope, IRIS and UNAVCO relating to their education and outreach activities. What do we learn from recent education reports that should shape our thinking about the facilities? Are there other emerging ideas that should be guiding our thinking about the ability of the facilities to support broader impacts? Michael Wysession and Dave Mogk will provide opening overviews and perspectives followed by group discussion and synthesis.

Evolving landscapes and global environmental change

Participants in this webinar will discuss and summarize recent "grand challenge documents" such as the Earthscope Science Plan and the Seismological and Geodetic Grand Challenges document in the context of these themes and processes. Geophysical instruments - in particular the dense and growing networks of geodetic and seismological instruments - can be invaluable in measuring environmental change (water, land, ice, and air movements and change; vegetation; human impacts).

Time-variant behavior of faults and magmatic systems and related hazards

This webinar will focus on defining 1) key science questions related to faulting processes and magmatic systems and their related hazards and 2) the facilities (seismological, geodetic, magnetotelluric and infrasound) that are needed to address make progress in these areas.

Earth structure, rheology and geodynamics

This webinar will explore frontiers in understanding Earth structure, rheology and geodynamical processes and link these research questions to priorities for future seismological, geodetic and MT facilities.